On a September night 47 years ago, I sat in a packed House Press Gallery as waves of applause hailed President Jimmy Carter and the leaders of Egypt and Israel for the Camp David accords ending decades of enmity between the two Middle East neighbors.

I was reminded of that Monday as I watched a similar scene unfold in Israel’s Knesset as President Donald Trump basked in acclaim for his success in forging the ceasefire and prisoner exchange ending the brutal two-year Israeli-Hamas war in Gaza.

“This week, against all odds, we have done the impossible,” the triumphant president declared, noting the region’s history of wars. He urged the region’s Arab leaders to join in the 2020 Abraham Accords establishing ties with Israel and predicted that even peace with Iran is a possibility.

Similarly, on that 1978 evening, Carter noted it had been 2,000 years since there had been peace in the Middle East and declared that, “if our present expectations are realized, this year we shall see such peace again.”

But those expectations were not realized. Other Arab nations rejected the agreement, and Israel’s problems dealing with the large Palestinian population in its West Bank, created continuing problems.

Similarly, the creation of a multi-national board to manage reconstruction of Gaza — to be chaired by Trump — won’t solve the more pressing problems of housing its 2 million homeless people, demilitarizing Gaza and integrating the enclave’s surviving Hamas leadership with the more moderate Palestinian Authority on the West Bank.

Later, Trump attended a follow-up multi-national conference in Egypt that sought to set procedures to deal with Gaza’s long-term problems. But the aftermath of Camp David should serve to warn him that more far-reaching agreements can prove elusive.

Even that initial agreement between Israel and Egypt nearly fell apart, due to disagreements over the meaning of some of the terms — especially a temporary curb on Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank. Carter had to make a hurried Middle East trip before the two nations formally signed a treaty some six months hence.

And though those accords envisioned a five-year transition period for achieving Palestinian rule in the West Bank, that never happened because the Palestine Liberation Organization and other Arab states said it gave Israel too much leeway to continue expanding the settlements there.

Camp David became Carter’s historic legacy, and the Israel-Egypt agreement has held. Though Carter failed to win the 1978 Nobel Peace Prize — which Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin shared — he ultimately won the award in 2002 for his global peace efforts.

Though Trump lost out this year to Venezuela opposition leader Maria Corina Machado, if there is further progress stemming from the Gaza ceasefire, he could well get it in a year or two.

That, of course, is a very big if. But Trump has the apparent desire of the region’s most important Arab nations, such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, to resolve long-standing enmities and achieve a comprehensive agreement. That was not true after the Camp David accords.

Another asset is momentum from the Abraham Accords, which his son-in-law, Jared Kushner negotiated in the closing months of his first term, under which four Arab nations negotiated normal relations with Israel — the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco.

Ultimately, pressure from Trump forced Netanyahu to accept the cease-fire after his ill-conceived decision to target some Hamas leaders in Qatar last month.

It was Trump’s persistence, all agree, that succeeded where prior efforts had failed. But the next steps remain more vague than the path laid out in the Camp David accords, presumably involving some sort of international stabilization force besides the massive mutinational rebuilding effort.

“Generations from now,” Trump said, “this will be remembered as the moment that everything began to change.” But it will take many months, if not years, for that to become reality.

Carl P. Leubsdorf is the former Washington bureau chief of the Dallas Morning News. Email him at carl.p.leubsdorf@gmail.com.

https://www.pilotonline.com/2025/10/15/column-trumps-gaza-speech-echoes-carters-on-camp-david/